Shaping the Discipline of Engineering Education

Journal of Engineering Education, Oct 2006 by Radcliffe, David F

In his landmark work, "Scholarship Revisited", the late Ernest Boyer [1] challenged us to rethink the research-teaching nexus in terms of a broader, more encompassing concept of scholarship. Based on an analysis of the work of faculty in US universities he described scholarship as a four part continuum, the Scholarship of Discovery, the Scholarship of Integration, the Scholarship of Teaching and the Scholarship of Application. While his inclusive view of scholarship was taken up by some universities around the world during the 1990s, it only recently that Boyer's ideas have begun to gain real traction. The 2006 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition in Chicago marked the beginning of the Year of Dialogue on Scholarship in Engineering Education. As engineering education emerges as a discipline in its own right [2], Boyer's conception of scholarship can guide this community as we establish our defining modes of inquiry, assemble a coherent body of knowledge and construct our characteristic practices. As a first step in shaping the discipline of engineering education we need to examine current and future notions of research in engineering; the scholarship of discovery.

ENGINEERING RESEARCH AND ENGINEERING PRACTICE

In engineering schools, it is generally assumed that propositional technical knowledge, discovered using a reductionist research paradigm, is the prime source of professional knowledge necessary for preparing students for the profession. Although seldom stated, the understanding of engineering practice that informs much research is that of technical rationality [3], where engineers are instrumental problem solvers drawing on the best available technical knowledge to suit the particular circumstance. Not surprisingly therefore engineering research focuses primarily upon relatively straightforward, tractable questions and technical problems. The positivist epistemology underlying research in engineering, which is dominated by engineering science, is often implicit and this way of knowing is assumed to be the only reliable mode of inquiry. It is not clear that the ontological assumptions behind the framing of much research in engineering schools are fully appreciated by faculty and students.

Engineering practice is of course a much more contingent, problematic venture than that portrayed by technical rationality. Engineering is a profoundly human activity which is values based and which involves making judgements when dealing with the type of "wicked problems" [4] encountered in professional practice. The messy, hard-to-get-a-handle-on issues that confront practitioners daily are not the subject of conventional research in engineering. There is a need for a broader conception of engineering and of engineering research, one that includes the practice of engineering and which takes account of other types of knowledge including procedural knowledge. There is currently a lively debate taking place in a number of other professions, including agriculture, nursing, therapies, public health and education, about the relationship between research and practice and the need for a scholarship of practice or a practice-oriented scholarship. The rise of engineering education as a discipline will catalyse this long overdue debate in engineering schools.

Fields like engineering design research, which has developed steadily over the past 20 years, have tackled some of the complex issues associated with doing engineering. This has been achieved by drawing on the research traditions of many disciplines including the social and behavioural sciences, and embracing diverse epistemological stances, research methods and practices in order to gain meaningful and trustworthy knowledge about the nature of engineering design. There are many parallels and lessons that can be learned from the relatively young field of design research in establishing the foundations for engineering education research. Indeed the two fields overlap.

AN EMERGING RESEARCH AGENDA

Research in engineering education is not limited to questions about learning per se. Rather it is concerned with the professional formation of engineers and the practice of engineering in a wider societal and global context. A series of research colloquy conducted under the auspices of the Centre for Scholarship in Engineering Education with support from the NSF drafted a five point research agenda for engineering education as follows.

* Engineering Thinking, Knowledge, and Competencies. Research on what constitutes engineering now and into the future.

* Socially-Relevant Engineering: Research on how diverse human talents contribute to the social and global relevance of our profession.

* Learning to Engineer: Research on developing knowledge and expertise in practice.

* Engineering Education Pedagogies ; Research on the instructional culture and epistemology of engineering educators.

* Engineering Assessment Methodologies: Research on, and development of, assessment methods, instruments and metrics to enhance engineering education.